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A long-time leader in the plasma collection industry uses TrueCommerce EDI to automate the exchange of outbound purchase orders and inbound invoices with its highest-volume vendors.

Part of UK-based Bio Products Laboratory, BPL Plasma has been a global leader in the plasma collection industry for over 25 years, with over 30 plasma collection centers across the US. The high-quality plasma BPL collects is sold to pharmaceutical companies worldwide. From there it is processed into a variety of lifesaving therapies used to treat conditions like hemophilia and immune system deficiencies, as well as aid victims of burns and shock.

Like many forward-looking healthcare suppliers, BPL strives to increase efficiency and reduce costs through automation. Currently, BPL uses TrueCommerce EDI for Microsoft Dynamics NAV to transact business with one of its highest-volume vendors.

Val Gameiro, Senior NAV Analyst, joined BPL in February of 2016. Among his first responsibilities was to complete the rollout of integrated TrueCommerce EDI for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, which BPL had already purchased, but had not fully implemented.

“One of our highest-volume vendors is EDI-capable, so to simplify the ordering process we wanted to transact business with them via EDI,” said Gameiro. “I researched other offerings, but by far the most cost-effective and low-impact option was to go with TrueCommerce EDI.”

BPL’s seamless purchasing integration of EDI with Dynamics NAV significantly accelerates purchasing transactions. “Placing orders using EDI is much easier, much faster and much less error-prone than doing everything by hand,” said Gameiro.

Without EDI, BPL’s supply chain team would need to save purchase orders created in Dynamics NAV in PDF format, and then email them to the supplier. The manual effort involved increases the potential for error on both ends, since technicians have to reenter the emailed information upon receipt. The same error-prone scenario applies to any document tracking and acknowledgement procedures.

EDI also greatly decreases the time it takes to process orders. “We don’t have to export a PDF file, attach it to an email, address the email and send it out for each individual order,” Mr. Gameiro clarifies. “TrueCommerce EDI just handles all the POs at the same time as a single operation—we upload it and it’s done.”

BPL’s purchasing integration is easy for business users to learn and use with minimal training, which reduces demands on IT. “We create orders in Dynamics NAV, export them as XML files, and import those into TrueCommerce,” said Gameiro. “Then TrueCommerce generates the EDI documents and sends them to our trading partner.

“We have three or four different people who have learned how to use the EDI system,” he added. “They’ve been able to handle everything themselves without a lot of support from me.”

TrueCommerce EDI offers built-in process controls that validate each EDI document to ensure it is complete and accurate before transmitting it. This helps reduce delays on orders.

“If something was missed on export that has to be corrected, that’s also pretty simple,” said Gameiro.

BPL’s EDI integration has been largely turnkey. “When I was first getting the solution up-and-running, I had some questions for TrueCommerce support, and some problems came up that they helped me resolve,” said Gameiro. “But since then, I’ve had no need to contact support at all.”